Finn sensed the rain coming, as he always did. He had his own way of knowing, because while the rest cared more for constant precaution than any sort of precision, Finn studied the movement of the clouds and the swirl of the wind, always on edge for that pivotal temperature drop, the daily appetizer to the promised shower. His method, so precise, guaranteed him time to set up his soap box and get his fiddle from its case. Meanwhile, patrons zipped up their jackets and fled into shops on the medieval city grid—two Claddagh jewelers, an Aran sweater outlet, an 800-year-old family restaurant famous for its oysters, a pet rescue center, a rank cheese shop, a spice market, and many pubs. Shop owners dropped their awnings on either side of Finn, who stood atop the soap box with his chin on the fiddle and right arm up, ready to play in harmony with that very first rain drop, which inevitably dropped on the fiddle’s bridge exactly as Finn drew his bow along those elevated strings. The first resonance: a solitary and miniscule puddle on his fiddle string amplified and beautified that first note as the sound passed fleetingly through a new medium. Water continued to fall around him, and although the other sections of Downtown Galway cleared out, Finn’s music drew his fans back into the rain. Finn stood at the very end of the cobbled limestone path, in the very center. As he gathered the rain, so he gathered the crowd, and though he privately welcomed both crowd and rain, publicly he would only allow that he withstood the crowd. They came for him, but he played for himself, yeah. Yet when the rain and his bow and the strings all met in the center of Shoppe Street, he stood as one with the crowd, faces familiar and foreign, becoming again so high. Oh, so high. The crowd tended to ascend with him, souls afloat alongside the notes. He had no amplifier or amphitheater, yet the haunting scratch of his strings jumped from drop to drop, crissing and crossing itself through the Irish air. Even children ignored their drive to be bored and listened willingly, not forcibly. As shopkeepers opened their doors to welcome the sound of the rain, patrons forged their forks upright in baked potatoes and slouched their spoons in cups of soup. Men in the pubs turned with pints in hand and mustaches stout-frothed, yeah. While flyers for dance lessons and bus tours taped to buildings wilted with the contact of each raindrop, listeners’ ears perked. Addicts drug virgins to the street, and upon first contact, they became reliant, too, upon the music, that majestic sound that the rain subtly distorted and enhanced. The scratchy, stringy squeal of his instrument, a hopeful tale of a miserable noise, offered more in its escape than in itself. In the green space beyond Finn and his stage, trees swayed not with the wind, but with the music, puppets tied to the strings of Finn’s bow, like the waves to the moon. In front of him, his sister Colleen, a simple lass made beautiful by her very simplicity, danced the river dance: step, step, kick, and hop. Shuffle, step, shuffle. Step, kick, step, step, jump. Twist. Land. His soul cried out with a joyful shout with each pluck and draw. The music’s moans lingered, tempting dogs from their homeless owners to chase after that squeal and match its sound. But the music played a game of catch and release, and as soon as it slowed to a pause, Finn’s bow came back across the bridge of his fiddle, falling gently across the arch of four strings, and a fresh moan echoed its predecessor, like a wolf howling back to itself in the darkness of night. With each moan, Colleen danced a new dance, blending with and amplifying her brother’s Gospel, yeah.
♭♭♭
Finn first knew the high thanks to the white lady. At uni, in his flat, with his mates. All of them sharing a date with the white lady, a part of their weekly routine. It started innocently enough, yeah. Paddy came back to their place in Galway one Monday during first year with a baggy of white powder, straight from his Dublin neighborhood. His mates from secondary school had introduced him to their most recent love. Finn didn’t know any better; that Thursday, they heated it up and drew it into the syringe. They tied and smacked their inner elbows until their inner tubes were a raised indigo, ready to receive the needle they all shared. It was innocent, yeah. Finn didn’t even like it at the start. From childhood until his pre-uni check-up, he held his mom’s hand for every vaccination, and he passed out when he got an IV the year before; now, the poke nearly killed his high before it started. He watched the needle pierce his elevated vein, and as Paddy pushed the rusty-brown liquid into his bloodstream, he gagged. But the high caught his vomit instantly, and he felt okay about this blind decision. The world slowed to a comfortable pace, and he relaxed within it. The tension flowed from his brain, billowing out of his head and through the window they’d opened to air out the scent of burning powder. The couch he sat on embraced him and brought him home, away from any qualms. And as his other flat mates, Niall and Jesse, let Paddy inject them, Finn smiled wide but did not leave the couch, gleeful for his friends but at home in his chair. The ease of the trip: so natural, yet so revolutionary. A habit? No, no, that wouldn’t end well. Even his intoxicated mind knew so. But a hobby? Why not, Finn thought. Of course, an Irishman knows no difference between a hobby and a habit, a habit and an addiction.
♭♭♭
Not until secondary school did Finn pick up a fiddle, and like a natural, he made the bow and instrument an extension of his body, like he’d always failed to do with his hurling stick. He pleaded to learn “Canticle of the Turning,” but his teacher demanded he first learn the scales. Though he obliged, Finn took to his own to begin filling spaces in, one by one, his own way, until he learned to play the canticle he so loved. When his stumbling and independent search for knowledge severed his tie to Church, Finn devoted himself to a new religion. He wore at his neck a fiddle to replace the Crucifix he’d received upon graduation from Nun’s Island, and so his mother prayed a rosary each day that he might return to her faith, but never that she might journey to his, as Colleen had. You see, Finn’s mother, Mary, always cared deeply that his faith develop properly so that he might, too. She sent him and Colleen to school with the Jesuits on Nun Island, and there they both learned, but never accepted, that a good Catholic lad or lass be obedient to their parents. Instead, Finn placed his obedience in the fiddle, and Colleen placed hers in Finn. So when Finn temporarily lost his faith in the fiddle to his faith in the white lady, Colleen had no idea that her conductor’s allegiance had shifted, while his mother no longer saw a son but a delinquent she must reform. But in her attempts to reform him by shame and patronization, his faith in his mother’s love disappeared, even though it still existed despite its torque. Atop his loss of faith, Finn found himself losing control. His childhood room had become his mother’s studio, which to him meant her excuse to violate his privacy. Had he nothing to hide, or had his mother given him a reason to keep his faith in her, he would not have minded the painter’s desk, the canvas paintings of the River Corrib visible through his window, or even the crucifixes taunting him from his walls. But as he became more and more dependent upon the White Lady, any semblance of a breach of his personal control drove him toward a brink. He hid his habit from his mother between the strings of the fiddle he hid from himself, which otherwise gathered dust in the corner of his closet. And one day, as Mary searched Finn’s closet for inspiration for yet another crucifix to craft, she blindly reached around and pulled a baggie from the fiddle. Next to her god, within his god, she found his mistress. Mary wept. And wept. And when Finn came home, she said nothing. Finn arrived home, strung out, to his fiddle on his pillow, the white lady still between its strings. The religious paraphernalia had been removed from his walls, the first step of his mother’s cleanse from that sacrilegious room. Finn collapsed upon his bed, lower that he’d ever been before, a crash so devastating that no rendezvous with the white lady could save him. His sister, dismayed and agnostic, peeked beyond Finn’s bedroom door. Sure enough, beside her brother’s head, Colleen saw a Eucharist inside an open Tabernacle. Finn found himself estranged from his family and moved permanently to his flat, which his sister frequented. Colleen asked him about the White Lady, and he spoke honestly of its false promise, taking on the rhetoric his mother used about Satan. It would tempt you and entice you, hold you captive until you lost yourself, string you along until it had strung you out. It was a false idol, the first heresy he’d doubted. She listened to his sermons, she really did. She believed the devastation of the fallout, the pain of estrangement even after years of fracture. And as Finn started those routines in the street, his new escape, she danced to the tune of the Tabernacle: a fairy for those onlookers with doubts of their own.
♭♭♭
Always, he began each set with that first song he learned, accompanied by Colleen. The music became her Mass, Finn her priest. She’d kick her shoes off when she felt the first drop, when Finn would play that perfect B note, and she would strut along the storefronts, coaxing the male patrons outside with her free spirit, her fair smile, her glistening, brown hair sprinkled with drops and partly illuminated gold by the sneaking slivers of sunlight. Many men fell in love with Colleen, but only one man, Corrigan, ever managed the charm to match the demands of her whimsy. It made little sense to Finn, who recognized him for his bushy beard and youthful green eyes, but he refused to interfere with his sister’s life. Finn was weary of, but tried to never be judgmental of, the white lady’s kiss upon Corrigan’s inner elbow. He noticed how deeply Corrigan cared for Colleen, and that intention was enough for Finn to justify his permission. Corrigan kept coming to the shows, enchanted like the rest of the audience by Finn’s fiddle and Colleen’s dance. But while everyone else understood Colleen as an unattainable dream, a fairy, Corrigan noticed in her a vulnerability to seal. Until him, she enchanted but eluded all of her onlookers until no one even dared approach her, presuming her to be more beautiful from a distance than close up. As Corrigan discovered, though, proximity only magnified her beauty, as long as she let it. Letting it, though, had become her demon when she pledged allegiance to her brother and all he did, leaving her own relationship with her mother behind. So when she finally let Corrigan in, she committed herself to filling her void with meaning. At first, the meaning was relational: she learned that Corrigan was 24, grew up in the North, found his dog along the quay, hadn’t been clean shaven in seven years, had two scars in the shape of a sailboat on his chest. Then, it became physical, and she asked about the constant bruises in the nook of his left elbow. For a while, he skirted the question, but when she found him with a needle one day before the rain, she asked for a shot. Their ritual had become a warm-up for her brother’s shows, and she was ready for the next step: When Finn opened the Tabernacle and raised his fiddle, prepping himself for the drug, she tied her arm and smacked it, too, bowing before the House of her Lord, ready to receive his bread and share a needle with Corrigan, the next step in their intimacy. And that day, just as Finn had gone from the high of the heroin to the high of the fiddle, his Colleen went from the high of the dance to the high of the heroin and became, finally, a fairy. Her dance took on a new meaning. Colleen traveled in a vessel without an ejection seat, or the perhaps the same vessel Finn had been in, and he had used its only exit. Eventually, on a day she piloted the vessel alone in her own apartment with Corrigan away and Finn waiting for the rain. And so in the absence of the only two men she ever loved, with neither around to save her, Colleen overdosed before the rain.
♭♭♭
When Colleen did not show up for her final dance, Finn met Corrigan for a pint. This man was his sister’s lover, his sister’s killer, but he was broken, he was. Fractured along the same fault line that Finn had been the night he lost his relationship to his mother, though Corrigan’s cut ran even deeper. For though Finn had his faults, he never felt at fault. And here he was, with Corrigan but without Colleen, the crash unceasing. At the pub, where patrons waited for him to emerge with his fiddle, Finn lashed out at Corrigan after more than a few stouts, his stubble frothy with foam. How could a man so in love put her so at risk, he screamed. Finn pulled Corrigan close to his face and kept screaming, and spittle carried from his lilt to Corrigan’s visage. Yeh’ve left me alone, yeh’ve taken me only family! But Corrigan, already guilty, wilted in his stool and cowered upon the bar. As Finn kept yelling, demanding a fight, he swept his own beer onto the ground and picked up a shard that he held to Corrigan’s neck, screaming that he would puncture his jugular, screaming, Fackin’ fight me, ya son of a bitch, screaming it over and over as the patrons of the bar watched their fiddler in a new light. Finn returned to his cot, where he did not pray nor play nor shoot, but became a faithless hermit. For the final time, he lost his faith, and he retired its idols: crucifix, needle, and fiddle. Over the next three months, it rained daily. On the first day, the people waited through the storm for their priest, eager to hear his obituary, needing it. When he didn’t show, they came back the next day, and the next one after that, until all who were left were the addicts who resided on that path permanently, led by Corrigan.
♭♭♭
On the first day of the fourth month of the year of Colleen’s death, Finn stepped into the rain. It washed through his unkempt, blonde beard, and slicked off his oily face. But he went on, his fiddle in hand, toward his quay that had been claimed by addicts of his past, whom he waited among until the sun overpowered the rain. He did not speak to any, but he sat with them, familiar with their plight. The clouds hastened their sprint back to Galway, after some time. Finn, though a recluse, had not lost his sense for the rain, and before the street cleared, he began constructing his familiar set up. The mass of people retreated into the markets, shops, and pubs, their faith in Finn’s reappearance gone. But as he felt the sky gape, he brought his bow to his strings and drew the horsehair across the tight coil, perfectly in sync with the first drop of rain. Finn’s fiddle led the cry, a low, slow whine. And though Finn typically didn’t sing, though he played an accompaniment so masterful that he didn’t need to accompany it with anything, he dropped the bow and raised his chin from the black, plastic piece of his fiddle and began, ever so slowly, so hauntingly, so fragilely, so unsteadily, to sing a canticle. My soul cries out with a joyful shout That the heart of my sister’s near It’s for she I sing of the wondrous things That will come to the ones who dare To fix their sight on their brother’s plight And to combat the roll of chance So from Eire to Gaul where she’s known to all Could Colleen be about to dance? Finn summoned, with that chant, a crowd disenchanted. As his fiddle carried its sound in its perfection, Finn’s voice resonated with the imperfect, and his obituary beckoned the followers who’d doubted. Up and down Shoppe Street, whether of the crowd or not, Finn’s moment became Galway’s when a rainbow snuck back through the gray cover and denizens began to sway, to dance. Even the sun-soaked buskers and weary addicts, the contingent of them parked at the intersection of Quays and Shoppe streets, gave a special respect for their local superior, up there singing for his sister. Colleen’s dance was the city’s, and they thought each of their own angels ushered from this life by the white lady: for some a former bandmate who left them to busk alone, for others a sibling, for one a mother, and for another his foe. But of them all, of all Galway’s sympathizers, Finn noticed only one as he returned to the fiddle. Though he should not have had the strength for empathy, he needed Corrigan’s. And Corrigan, standing now where Colleen had always danced, locked eyes with Finn, and as Finn sang, he understood by the lilt of Corrigan’s green eyes that he should hate him, but he couldn’t. He knew from his own past that Corrigan had never intended this to be their reality, that had he understood the danger, had he lost a life besides his own before, he would have been more responsible. He knew that, had Corrigan found his own fiddle, his own, personal salvation, it could have raised him up—higher than the white lady could, as high as Colleen did. But fate’s fatal circumstance killed Colleen and smeared her blood on Corrigan’s hands and stained it to his conscience. Should he be tasked again with a life not his own, he might be trusted. So Finn kept singing , and Corrigan stood with him now on the soapbox, his voice magnified so that the whole town could hear. And Colleen’s dear brother picked up his Tabernacle and enchanted a people as only Étain had before in Éireann, his fiddle a new relic to the town’s tradition, all while her accidental lover and remorseful killer sang to the streets a prayer. Above them, across the sea and beyond the mountains, Colleen danced freely, unbound after a year of bondage to the white lady. Each step of her bare feet pushed the clouds east until, finally, she watched from backstage as her brother and her lover filled Shoppe Street, the scene overcome by sunlight striking ancient limestone and reflecting off of the puddles on the awnings and creating halos atop the performers’ wet heads. In the crowd, a mother, an elderly couple, the buskers, and the rest of the lot froze under the sun. The city suddenly attached itself to the fiddle’s strings—a marionette at the mercy of the music. Finn, lost completely in his notes, could not remember then and would not remember ever a high so severe, so fulfilling. Behind him, he felt the warmth of Colleen’s fair smile, and for the first time in a month, he smiled, too.